A College Feud on NBC

Early one morning fifteen years ago, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the entire press run of the Harvard Crimson disappeared from the front hall of the newspaper’s offices. Jeff Zucker was the president of the paper at the time, and he vividly remembers his reaction: “I was pissed. I knew it was Conan who had stolen it, of course. So I called the police.”

Conan O’Brien, the lanky, orange-haired host of NBC’s “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” was then the president of the Harvard Lampoon. He recalls that he and others at the humor magazine hijacked that day’s Crimson on impulse, after a late night of carousing. “It was hardly the perfect crime,” O’Brien said the other day. “College pranks are supposed to be clever, but our rivalry with the Crimson had degenerated into us stealing something, Jeff calling the police, and the police making us haul it back.”

A few weeks ago, when Zucker, the longtime executive producer of the “Today Show,” was named NBC’s president of entertainment, O’Brien realized that his old nemesis would be his new boss. Zucker will also preside over a number of other Lampoon alumni who write for NBC programs. “This might be the ultimate Crimson prank,” O’Brien said. “The ultimate retribution.”

A few days after his appointment, Zucker was packing up his corner office at NBC Studios in Rockefeller Center; he starts his new job, in Los Angeles, this week. Balding and slight, and as compressed as a power coil, he sat at his desk in a gray turtleneck and talked about the battles of his college days. “Those Lampoon guys were such assholes to us,” he said, his eyes glinting behind horn-rims. “But we took the rivalry even more seriously, because we saw it as determining bragging rights to importance on campus, to primacy.”

The eternally contending Crimson and Lampoon world views amount to one of Aesop’s fables: who will prosper, the ant or the grasshopper? The Crimson, an accomplished daily newspaper bursting with editorials that purport to solve the world’s problems, has been the proving ground for Franklin Roosevelt, Caspar Weinberger, David Halberstam, and James Fallows. The Lampoon, a den of layabouts who infrequently publish a magazine of whimsies and witticisms, has produced John Updike, George Plimpton, Fred Gwynne (television’s Herman Munster), and much of the writing staff of “The Simpsons.”

One memento already stripped from Zucker’s wall and stowed in a brown moving box was his official Crimson caricature. While Zucker was an undergraduate, Lampoon editors stole the Crimson’s prized collection of caricatures of its past presidents and mailed them—for reasons too obscure to go into here—to Duluth, Minnesota. They disabled the Crimson’s phones. They published a number of wounding Crimson parodies and an issue of the Lampoon that included a fake phone-sex ad with Zucker’s dorm-room phone number. Zucker did not find any of this particularly hilarious.

Then the magazine stole the paper’s presidential throne. The Crimson responded to this crowning indignity by mounting an operation to scale the side of the Lampoon’s mock-Flemish castle and steal its figurehead, a copper ibis. The prank-weary Cambridge police arrived at 6 a.m. and carted two red-handed Crimson editors off to jail. Zucker did not participate in this adventure. One colleague recalls, “He was very presidential: he preserved deniability and then cleaned up the mess.” Zucker bailed out his colleagues and promised the dean of students that Crimson men would henceforth return to their sobersided ways.

Conan O’Brien has come to admire Zucker’s political instincts, and in recent years has sought his advice on network intrigues. But some of the mutual bewilderment lingers. “Late Night” has often made the “Today Show” a target of its high jinks, like the time O’Brien’s sidekick, Andy Richter, walked naked through the set during a Matt Lauer interview. “It was . . . funny,” Zucker said gravely.

As a newsman entering the world of Lampoon values, Zucker knows that he will need not only to display his managerial skills but also to develop a cast-iron sense of humor; the previous NBC Entertainment president lasted just eighteen months. “My first day,” Zucker said, “CBS announced that they’re putting ‘Survivor II’ up against NBC’s ‘Friends.’ That’s an incredible wake-up call, an attack on our biggest hit comedy. But I’m a very competitive guy, so I welcome the challenge.” Perhaps he can draw on the talents of some of the Lampoon alumni on the network’s payroll. “I’m a big fan of Lampoon writers,” he said, with exaggerated heartiness. “I’ve always loved the Lampoon!”

O’Brien, whose contract is due to be renegotiated next year, is willing to help out however he can, if only Zucker will lower his guard a bit. “I occasionally stand outside the ‘Today Show’ window and press my face against the glass,” O’Brien said. “Jeff scowls at me and calls the police. It’s still pretty much the same pattern: the coyote and the sheepdog.” ♦

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